BMJ quality & safety
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The world is not flat. Hierarchy is a fact of life in society and in healthcare institutions. National, specialty-specific and institutional cultures may play an important role in shaping today's patient-safety climate. ⋯ Checklists may make power distance-hampered negotiations easier by providing a standardised aviation-like framework for communications and by democratising the environment. By using surveys and simulation, we might discover patterns of potentially hidden yet problematic interactions that might foster maintenance of the error swamp. We need to understand how people interact as members of a group as this is crucial for the development of generalisable safety interventions.
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BMJ quality & safety · Jul 2012
Comparative StudyAssociations between Internet-based patient ratings and conventional surveys of patient experience in the English NHS: an observational study.
Unsolicited web-based comments by patients regarding their healthcare are increasing, but controversial. The relationship between such online patient reports and conventional measures of patient experience (obtained via survey) is not known. The authors examined hospital level associations between web-based patient ratings on the National Health Service (NHS) Choices website, introduced in England during 2008, and paper-based survey measures of patient experience. The authors also aimed to compare these two methods of measuring patient experience. ⋯ Unsolicited web-based patient ratings of their care, though potentially prone to many biases, are correlated with survey measures of patient experience. They may be useful tools for patients when choosing healthcare providers and for clinicians to improve the quality of their services.